Field Detail

• INCH

  public static final Unit INCH

  Size in "inches", America's pre-industrial age measuring unit. Roughly corresponds to the size of your big toe (the fact that there are 12 inches to a foot seems a bit strange given that most of us have only 10 toes).

  Interestingly, a "two by four" is a common description for a wooden beam used in construction, stemming from their having originally had a cross-section of 2 by 4 inches. Successive generations of profiteering forestry companies and unscrupulous builders have, however, cut margins and shortchanged customers to the point where a modern "two by four" you can buy at a lumber yard is barely a miserable 0.79 by 1.57 inches in cross-section. This, amazingly enough, is exactly 2 by 4 centimetres.

  Reports of a conspiracy to force the Americans to switch to metric are, obviously, completely baseless.

• MM

  public static final Unit MM

  Size in millimetres, which are 1/10^th of a centimetre and 1/1000^th of a metre.

• PIXEL

  public static final Unit PIXEL

• POINTS

  public static final Unit POINTS

  Size in "points", which are defined as 1/72^nd of an inch, which works out to about 0.35 millimetres.